Newt Gingrich Twitter Mystery: the Disappointing Sequel

A deleted tweet, lost to the ages.By now surely you’ve heard of a scandal that has enveloped Twitter.com/NewtGingrich: Gawker, going on a tip from an anonymous source, reported that the novelty presidential candidate “hired a firm to boost his follower count, in part by creating fake accounts en masse.” Our generation’s Watergate investigation was prompted by Gingrich’s whining a few days earlier that he had more Twitter followers, but less of a command of the news cycle, than, say, someone much more relevant to the current decade like Michele Bachmann. A staffer who has yet to quit, R. C. Hammond, denied Gingrich purchased Internet friends. “At no time has the campaign or Gingrich Communications employed an outside group to inflate the number of followers of @newtgingrich. Any accusation of the kind is a lie, a smear and unsubstantiated,” he said in a statement. “Twitter’s addition of @newtgingrich to the suggested user list is responsible for a large, but indeterminable amount of followers. Twitter users follow Newt the same way they elect to follow Ashton Kutcher, Shaquille O’Neal or John McCain. Twitter alone is the authority on counting followers and policing their legitimacy.”

It does appear to be a logical explanation, although this is not the former House Speaker’s only Twitter transgression. Gingrich has yet to break his five-month silence regarding this blog’s exposé of his alleged tweet scrubbing.